Album Review: Sex Hands – Pleh

When you talk about slackers, the glamorous, Americanised image is of beautiful surfer dudes smoking lots of weed and making lovely, reverb-heavy music about being sad. Best Coast, basically. The British equivalent isn’t nearly as cool. With a climate like ours, it’s nicer to sit in and watch telly all day and eat biscuits and ignore the washing up. Manchester DIY stalwarts Sex Hands have at least four songs about watching Friends on Pleh.

As harrowing as that sounds, it does lend itself to the best chorus on the record in On A Break‘s “It’s not that common/It doesn’t happen to every guy/It is a big deal/If it happens all the time”. That is very much offset by Chandler In A Box‘s ugly “Bros before hos” refrain. Sometimes it’s just nice to change the channel, you know. In hindsight, I don’t know why I was surprised. I’ve just looked through their 2012 record Season 1’s tracklisting and seen another four obvious Friends references in the titles. Maybe it’s their thing, but what a terrible thing it is. Maybe I’m being a bit hypocritical, much of my time at university was spent watching Friends. But that was a long time ago now, my tastes are dead refined and that now. Someone needs to find Sex Hands’ collective remote control.

I didn’t want to spend most of this review talking about Friends. Usually the last thing in the world I’d want to do is talk about Friends. I wanted to talk about how the first time I saw them play it was at a house party that was shut down by the police just after they played, it’s just that Sex Hands’ trebly, jangly, recorded-in-a-bucket indie starts to blur into one after a while. The highlights bookend the record with the instrumental Space Song and the closing nonsense of An Eight with it’s barked lyrics and guitar stabs falling apart after just under a minute only to rebuild into frantic riffing and noisy feedback. If only they sounded like they cared this much all the way through. I bet someone will tell me this one’s about bloody Friends as well now. Give it a rest, yeah.

Like all cis-male atopic half Welshmen, I'm a big fan of shouty indie, noisy drone and the daytime Radio 1 playlist. Outside of punk rock my primary interests are tea (white no sugar please) and beer (brown no sugar please). When I'm not writing about stuff for Silent Radio I'm occasionally doing my own stuff which you can read about at http://dead-pheasant.blogspot.com if you want (you should).